116 pointsby freediver3 hours ago12 comments
  • amatechaan hour ago
    Nice, I'm surprised it took this long! My first experience of playing Quake 1 in my home was an unauthorized source port which ran in System 7, I believe was called "HackQuake", ported from stolen source code from CrackDotCom apparently[0][1] .. For me as a kid getting insanely impatient to play Quake, this was a godsend! Even if the performance was brutal and firing a rocket caused the framerate to halve. Played it at 320x200 pixel-doubled just to eke out that extra little bit of performance. Anyway, the point is that HL probably could have been running on Mac since day one, if someone had spent the time to port it!

    [0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/hackers-hack-crack-steal-quake...

    [1] https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive/blob/...

    • EPWN3D13 minutes ago
      I remember when TIE Fighter finally came out for the Mac, I just begged my parents to order it from Mac Warehouse or whichever catalogue it was in. I didn't read the system requirements, which said it needed a PowerPC. I was still rocking a Quadra 610 that I'd upgraded to a 50MHz 68040 and 24 MB of RAM.

      When I got the game and looked at the box, I was heartbroken. But I decided, why not put in the disk anyway. I did the Get Info on the app, and lo and behold, Lucas Arts had left what was probably a totally untested 68k slice in the binary. Double-clicked it, and I could play without a problem. Sure I had to play it in a tiny 320x240 window, but that extra 16 MB of RAM and extra 25 MHz made it playable.

  • xp847 minutes ago
    More and more, I wonder if projects like this (I assume they're made possible 'all of a sudden' because of AI coding tools) are going to eventually breathe new life into dozens of "obsolete" platforms long ago deemed too costly to keep supporting. Maybe we'll be able to daily drive OS9 with modern browsers and bugfixes. Or for those of us less masochistic, say, Windows 2000 or NextStep!
  • wk_end2 hours ago
    The most interesting thing about this link, for me, is seeing that there's an open-source recreation of GoldSrc [0]? That's apparently been around since 2011 [1]? I'm stunned I haven't heard about this before. Very cool.

    [0] https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs

    [1] https://www.moddb.com/engines/xash3d-engine

  • ayaros14 minutes ago
    Runs nicely on my iBook G3!

    Is the OS 9 build supposed to include Blue Shift and Opposing Force, or is that only a reference to the Tiger and Leopard ports? Just tried out the Tiger port on my iMac G4; it also runs fine!

  • sharkjacobsan hour ago
    I would have been really excited about this circa 1999. I mean don't get me wrong, I was grateful for Unreal Tournament and Q3A, and I knew I'd be getting Halo soon, but this is the one game I was really jealous of my friends for.
    • jonhohlean hour ago
      > I knew I'd be getting Halo soon

      That’s a deep cut. (And salt on the wound.)

      • NateEag40 minutes ago
        I sometimes wonder what the timeline where Bungie didn't write the Myth II uninstaller-can-wipe-your-hard-drive bug would look like.

        IIUC, the fact that they reprinted all the discs and manually replaced all the boxed, ready-to-ship discs to avoid any chance of destroying someone's data wound up eating most of the profits from Myth II.

        That, in turn, led to the situation where they were too cash-strapped to finish Halo on their own, resulting in the infamous moment where Apple decided to buy them after all just a couple days too late: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bung...

        I still fantasize about an Oni-meets-Mirror's-Edge freerunning / martial arts game.

        Maybe there'd have been one if not for that bug.

    • snapetoman hour ago
      Hah. When I saw the headline, I said, "Finally! I've been asking for this for almost 30 years!"
      • NateEag39 minutes ago
        Likewise. I still remember being upset when the news broke that the port had been dropped.
  • hedgehog2 hours ago
    For reference this is roughly period correct for the early iMac models (G3 and DV) that came out in 1998 and 1999, though MacOS 9 didn't ship until later. Impressive porting work.
    • walrus0116 minutes ago
      The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use...

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2

      Or a voodoo2...

    • mikestorrent40 minutes ago
      Always weirds me out to see an iMac running an OS older than OS X. The physical design language really ended up dictating the OS X look, didn't it? Still does, in a way, with Liquid Glass bringing back clear.
      • mistercow29 minutes ago
        I think the technology also dictated it. It’s easy to forget that in those days the idea of window chrome being full color, full transparency, with live window dragging and visuals not locked to tiling 8x8 or at best 32x32 elements was incredibly novel. And that was as much about preemptive multitasking and expecting and allowing every application to keep its windows up to date as it was about Quartz.

        Aqua was garish and in your face, but it needed to be in order to be a symbol of what the system had achieved, which I think was especially important because that came at the cost of being a buggy, immature OS that had to run crucial apps in a hideous compatibility mode while it was getting established.

        Edit: and if I can be a cranky old codger for a moment, I think that Liquid Glass unintentionally serves just as well as a symbol for what Apple has become: a company grasping to relive the memory of innovation without remembering how to innovate.

        • hedgehog15 minutes ago
          At the time there was also a major push to bring desktop computing and the web to the general population, remember this was a time when cutting costs enough to market a $1000 PC ($2000 adjusted for inflation) was considered a major achievement, the very bottom of the market. I get the sense that Apple was trying to distance its design as much as possible from square-cornered beige boxes as possible to signal that the products were for normal people.
  • purpleflame125729 minutes ago
    So will this run through Classic no problem, yes? I almost want to break my powebook G4 out of mothballs on principle to try this.
  • ChrisMarshallNY3 hours ago
    That's nice.

    Now do MacOS 26, on M chips.

    [UPDATE] To make it clear, it was a joke (always a faceplant, on HN, where senses of humor go to die). It's actually very cool. I just get cranky that 3/4 of my Steam games don't work on new Macs, and I did like HL.

    • ChrisMarshallNY3 hours ago
      But, to make it clear, it was a joke. It's actually very cool. I just get cranky that 3/4 of my Steam games don't work on new Macs, and I did like HL.
      • bombcar2 hours ago
        I love that simcity4 has an applesilicon and big name recent releases don't.

        Yay.

      • lenerdenator2 hours ago
        Nah, that's based.

        If Apple Silicon ran my games collection I simply wouldn't have another computer other than my M2 MBP. I've run Fallout 3 on it, and while the emulation isn't perfect, it is playable and runs. The fan doesn't turn into a jet aircraft at takeoff, the temps stay cool.

        The fact that most games won't play on Apple Silicon natively is a crime.

    • altern83 hours ago
      I think those guys are about classic Macs
      • ChrisMarshallNY3 hours ago
        I know. It was kind of a joke, which, due to this being HN, fell flat.
        • acheron2 hours ago
          We at Hacker News do not have a sense of humor that we’re aware of.
        • altern83 hours ago
          I see. Maybe it was a little random
    • ofalkaed2 hours ago
      Jokes are downvoted not because of a lack humor but because if we reward making jokes we will have to scroll through dozens of jokes and all of their responses to get the actual discussion. Voting is about keeping the on topic and worthwhile discussion at the top with everything else buried beneath it.
      • drnick1an hour ago
        You must be fun at parties.
        • yhjc2692an hour ago
          must?
          • ofalkaed25 minutes ago
            Apparently so, he does not seem to be giving me any choice in the matter.
    • Barbing3 hours ago
      Missing a bounty to go with that directness!
    • 3 hours ago
      undefined
    • rvz2 hours ago
      This is the only site where it is illegal to make a joke.
    • parl_match3 hours ago
      you do it.
  • frollogaston2 hours ago
    Porting AssaultCube should be doable too
  • system7rocksan hour ago
    Wow. This is the golden age for classic Macs.
  • pimlottc3 hours ago
    Cleverly done.
  • mcfdoesdev2 hours ago
    This makes me so happy lol.